maid-of-all-work

maid-of-all-work (plural maids-of-all-work)

1. A female servant employed to do general housework.
   • 1770, Thomas Bridges, chapter 7, in The Adventures of a Bank-Note‎, volume 3, London: T. Davies, published 1771, page 54:

     Now this honest little fellow being a bachelor, keeps but one servant, which he calls a maid of all work. When he gets drunk, which doth not happen above seven times a week, he is never so happy as when he is expatiating on the virtues of this virgin of his, especially her sobriety.

   • 1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, “38”, in Vanity Fair , London: Bradbury and Evans , published 1848, →OCLC:

     The Irish maid Betty Flanagan’s bonnets and ribbons, her sauciness, her idleness, her reckless prodigality of kitchen candles, her consumption of tea and sugar, and so forth occupied and amused the old lady almost as much as the doings of her former household […] about which the good lady talked a hundred times a day. And besides Betty Flanagan, Mrs. Sedley had all the maids-of-all-work in the street to superintend.

   • 1883, R. E. N. Twopeny, “Servants”, in Town Life in Australia‎, London: Elliot Stock:

     Directly you come to incomes below a thousand a year, the number of servants is often reduced to a maid-of-all-work, more or less competent according to her wages, which run from seven to fifteen shillings a week. At the former price she knows absolutely nothing; at the latter something of everything. She cooks, washes, sweeps, dusts, makes the beds, clears the baths, and answers the door.

   • 1904, Christine Terhune Herrick, chapter 4, in The Expert Maid-Servant‎, Harper & Bros.:

     […] it is difficult to define with clearness the exact duties of the maid-of-all-work. She understands that she is to do cooking, waiting, and chamber-work, and probably washing and ironing.

2. (by extension, humorous) Any person who does a wide range of jobs in a supportive role; a thing that serves a wide range of purposes.
   • 1916, Charles Zueblin, “Rejuvenating the Constitution”, in Yale Law Journal‎, volume 25, page 218:

     These colossal changes necessitate an attempt to adapt the constitution of 1789 to an entirely different kind of civilization from the one for which it was planned. The only significant change made to meet this new civilization is the great American maid-of-all-work, the Inter-State Commerce Commission.

   • 1917 February 28, “Essence of Parliament”, in Punch‎, volume 152, page 143:

     Sir GEORGE CAVE is the Ministerial maid-of-all-work. Whenever there is a disagreeable or awkward measure to introduce it falls to the Quite-at-Home Secretary, if I may borrow an expression coined by my friend, TOBY, M.P., for one of Sir GEORGE’S predecessors.

   • 1937, Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana‎, Chapter:

     The German told us he had been three years in Afghanistan and six months in Mazar, where he acts as maid-of-all-work for bridges, canals, roads, and building in general.

   • 1940 December, O. S. M. Raw, “The Rhodesia Railways—II”, in Railway Magazine, page 639:

     The 12th class engines, introduced by Mr. Gray in 1926, and all built by the North British Locomotive Co. Ltd., forms the largest class on the line and can best be described as "maids of all work".

   • 1945 November and December, H. C. Casserley, “Random Reflections on British Locomotive Types—1”, in Railway Magazine, page 319:

     At the other extreme, we have that true maid-of-all-work type, the 0-6-0, the mainstay of goods, shunting, and often of passenger work right from the earliest days to the present time.

• “maid-of-all-work”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.